Bluetooth Noise and Sound Quality Issues on Android Marshmallow

[peter1233]

I use Spotify almost exclusively on Android connected to Bluetooth and hear a lot of noise in the sound when music is playing.  The audio system is very high quality and doesn't have any bluetooth noise from Apple devices or older Android versions, it occurs only with Android Marshmallow devices.

The problem is well documented in this prior thread (Android marshmallow and sound quality), which has incorrectly been labeled as solved because solution identifed in that thread of shutting of EQ does not fix the problem. 

In older versions of Android, the problem could be fixed by disabling NuPlayer in developer settings, but it doesn't seem to be possible to disable NuPlayer in Marshmallow.

My requests are:  

1) If anyone experienced and solved this problem, please post the solution here.

2) If anyone else still has this issue, please take a minute to share your experiences here so that we can finally get the problem solved.  It seems to be a problem that both Spotify and Google have been ignoring for a long time.

[smc896]

Maybe this page will help?

https://recomhub.com/blog/android-6-0-marshmallow-problems-with-bluetooth-solved/ 

[peter1233]

Thank you for the suggestion, but I have cleared the cache many times and tried all of the Bluetooth help suggestions and none of them have worked.

It is possible that the problem is related to people using higher quality AptX bluetooth audio equipment, although I don't know for sure that it is related to AptX.  Ironicially, I changed from Apple to Android specifically to get AptX (Apple doesn't support it), but now I've spent a lot of money on a sound sytem, Android tablet, and recurring charges on Spotify for sound that is horrible. 

[peter1233]

Does anybody else have this issue?   I expected to see plenty of people chiming in about this issue, but it has been dead silent in this thread, and people seem to think it is solved in the other thread I referenced.

Because of the lack of response, I thought maybe it was an equipment issue on my part, so I did some more testing.  I tried it with a completely different audio system sending bluetooth to a fairly high-end Emotiva preamp and I still hear noise on Android Marshmallow.   To be clear, the noise is subtle clicks and pops and stutters in the sound -- it is not a lot of distortion, but you hear random subtle noises.  I tried the same music from an iPhone and there are no issues on either audio system, but I always hear noise with Android Marshmallow.

Based on the above, I don't think it is related to my hardware and the problem is definitely still there for me.